Advancement within computing and communications technology has significantly altered business practice regarding transfer of information via documents. Formatted documents can now be delivered electronically over a substantial distance almost instantaneously. In business and personal environments, however, a substantial amount of reviewing and/or editing is completed on printed documents. For instance, meetings within a work environment typically include distributing printed documents to those in attendance. Moreover, many individuals prefer reading and/or editing documents on paper rather than reading and/or editing on a computer screen.
In a business or personal environment wherein a substantial amount of documents are printed, indexing such documents to their respective electronic versions is problematic. Damage to documents, including stains and tears, as well as annotations made upon the printed documents can cause further difficulties in relating the printed documents to their respective electronic versions. For example, a document can be printed and distributed at a meeting, and attendants of the meeting may annotate the documents via pen or similar marking tool according to thoughts regarding the meeting in connection with information in the document. The document may then be folded, smudged, torn, and/or damaged in another similar manner as it is placed in a folder and transported from the meeting to a different location. Thereafter the document can lie within a stack of other documents for hours, days, or even months. If an electronic version of the printed document is desirably located, a significant amount of time can be required to locate such electronic version. Furthermore, if the electronic version of the document cannot be located, resources may have to be allocated to re-type the document into a computer.
Other scenarios also exist in which locating an electronic version of a document based upon a physical version of the document (e.g., printed version) can be problematic. For example, a vendor can prepare and fax a draft purchase-order to a consumer, and upon receipt of such purchase-order the consumer can modify contents of the faxed document by physically modifying the document via pen or other suitable marking tool. Thereafter, the consumer can relay the modified document back to the vendor via a fax. In order to locate the electronic version of the printed document, the vendor must search through the database and match the printed version of the document to the electronic version of the document by hand. Correlating between the electronic version and the printed version of the document can require a substantial amount of time, especially in instances when a person who created the document is unavailable to assist in matching the printed document to its electronic counterpart (e.g., the individual takes vacation, retires, . . . ).
Conventional systems and/or methodologies for remedying problems associated with indexing physical documents with corresponding electronic documents require marking a printed document with identifying information. For example, a file location can be included in each printed document (e.g., in a header of each printed document, an extended file location relating to a corresponding electronic version can be printed to enable locating the electronic version). Alternatively, unique bar codes can be placed on each printed document, wherein the bar codes can be employed to locate an electronic version of the document. For example, a bar-code scanner can be utilized to scan a barcode on a printed document, and a corresponding electronic version of the document can be retrieved based upon the scanning. Such identifying information, however, is aesthetically displeasing as such information clutters the document. Moreover, tears, smudges, annotation or other physical damage/alteration to a printed document can render such conventional systems and or methodologies substantially useless. For example, if a portion of a bar code is torn from the printed document, a bar code scanner will not be able to correctly read the bar code. Similarly, a smudge on a document can render unreadable a printed location of an electronic version of the document. Optical character recognition (OCR) can also be employed in connection with locating an electronic version of a document based upon a printed version. For instance, the printed document can be digitized (e.g., via a scanner, digital camera, . . . ), and a computing component can utilize OCR to identify particular characters in the digitized printed document and match such characters to corresponding characters in the electronic version of the printed document. Such a technique, however, requires a substantial amount of computing resources. Furthermore, a database can comprise several hundred or several thousand documents, and performing OCR on several documents can take a significant amount of time. Other applications that are employed to locate an electronic version of a document based on a printed document utilize keywords (e.g., date modified or other keywords) to locate the electronic version. It is, however, difficult to obtain keywords, and several documents can include such keywords.
In view of at least the above, there exists a strong need in the art for a system and/or methodology for a robust indexing of electronic documents and corresponding physical documents, as well as a system and/or methodology enabling retrieval of an electronic document based upon a printed version of the document, as well as information associated with the electronic document (e.g., database records, workflow, . . . ).